Windows Live Writer 2011 is a blog publishing application which is probably the easiest way to publish your latest blog post. Developed by Onfolio shortly before its acquisition by Microsoft, it is a great tool for every blogger out there and is included for free with Windows Live Essentials 2011. It’s compatible with RSD (Really Simple Discoverability) which in means it will work with… well pretty much any blog platform out there. I am happy to report that Blogengine.net, QBS’ blog platform of choice is supported too. If you are regularly updating your computer you will find it installed on your Windows 7 machine as Microsoft decided to release Windows Live Essentials 2011 via Microsoft Update a couple of weeks ago.

Great, so let’s start. If you haven’t done so you need to download and run Windows Live Essentials 2011 first.

Choose Install all of the Windows Live Essentials (recommended) option.

You will need to wait few minutes for the installation to finish

When the installation is complete, we are ready for the first launch

First you will be presented with the welcome screen. Click Next

Select which blog platform you are using. For Blogengine.net we need to select Other services:

You then need to provide the URL of your blog and the credentials for the account you are using to log in:

Now you are asked if you would like to download the theme from the blog. If you have an existing theme and you are happy with it, select Yes. Otherwise you can use Writer later on to create a theme.

It will then connect to your blog and configure Windows Live Writer 2011.

You will now be asked for your nickname. Please note that your login for the blog rather than this nickname will be used for the author field in the blog post.

And we are finally done:

In the next blog post I will go through cool features of Writer 2011 and share with you a few tips so make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, because otherwise you might miss it.

If you have any questions or comments please make sure you use the comments field.